A new way to make coffee
Routine can be nurturing, routine can be death
The aroma, first of all. The aesthetics, the culture, the color when I swirl the pot in morning sunlight through the window. Obviously the flavor, plus the caffeine blocking the binding of adenosine.
I drink coffee twice in the morning, once in the afternoon, and sometimes an espresso after dinner if it’s available. Also, I often think about coffee before I sleep, in anticipation. I don’t know if there’s a coffee drink I don’t like—I drink it black or with milk, I like a cortado, a macchiato, I’ll take drip from 7-11, I’ll buy a can of Starbucks at the gas station.
In forty-plus years of existence, thirty-something as a coffee drinker, I’ve maybe taken a dozen days off?
Addiction!
Recently, though, I changed things up. It happened after a friend brewed me a cup of coffee at his home—a very good cup of coffee—and I thought, I could have this at home, too?
As a writer, as this writer, I do my best in the morning. And for a good fifteen years, prior to writing, it’s been Nespresso—a double (N)espresso followed by another double (N)espresso—or else a mug of instant coffee. Because both methods are fast, reliable, efficient. I appreciate hearing about other people’s methods, the folks like my friend who take the good ten minutes: grind beans, heat water, pour the water over slow. But I also thought of such things as semi-precious, even flamboyant, just a little much, not for me.
Because maybe, if I’ll admit here to things not super-pretty, I like to operate in similar ways to a Nespresso machine. Reliable. Consistent. Sacrificing some things for other things like efficacy.
And maybe that’s a good way to be, but maybe it’s a bad way to be. Why not, I wondered lately, invite myself to be more flamboyant, a little much?
To step back a moment, the concept of routine, for me, isn’t too far removed from the concept of archetypes. A comforting notion of things perhaps inherited, perhaps universal, even required—or at least the adoption of such things and ideas as ways one ought to be in the world. Have a plan. Keep a to-do list. Go about my time with intention. Don’t get lost, don’t fuck up, don’t be messy or make mistakes—concepts I’ve been dragging around perhaps since childhood.
But how humane is that really?
How rigidly must I run and be shaped, and how deadened?
I wrote here last week about reading the first book in Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume series. I finished the second book this week, and I underlined this passage, wherein the narrator meets a meteorologist in a hospital:
She did not believe… that the seasons could be regarded as meteorological phenomena. Temperature and precipitation were meteorological phenomena, she said. Cold and heat, cloudbursts and drought. But seasons? She saw them more as psychological phenomena. Memory concentrates. Accepted stereotypes. Conglomerates of experiences and feelings, perhaps. People ask if it won’t soon be summer, even though we are well into July, simply because the summer has been on the cool side. As a meteorologist one is almost expected to deliver particular weather conditions at particular times of year, she said. A proper summer. A proper winter. As if you hadn’t done your job until you had delivered a certain sort of weather.
The point is, and maybe I’m making (way) too much of this, but the proper season of my morning coffee routine was getting stale.
To take an even further step back—but I think it’s connected—something else I was thinking about this week is that I sense myself as someone who identifies with himself through language, understands himself in words. At the same time, I know by this point in life that language fails, only gets me so far. And I used to believe such failure was important to preserve certain things, mystery and impulse and artistic whim. But now in my forties, I’ve discovered the task—and also the delight, frankly—is to investigate those things via language: writing, reading, conversation (over coffee).
Which is one reason why I respond to and appreciate my psychotherapy. With my analyst there’s still language, of course—it’s all we’ve got, it’s how we’re built, blah blah blah. But in her office, on the couch, in the light through the windows, we’ve developed a sort of lexicon to map my psyche, to grasp what’s real and what’s not. And there are still new clues emerging, new realizations to wallop me on a regular basis—a web of motifs both expanding and drawing close.
And do I bring a coffee every time to therapy? Hell yeah. But for two-plus years, I’ve also had routine: I hit the Starbucks near her office and use a fake name—my name is a nightmare for baristas—and order my order. (Iced Americano.) However, last Thursday I switched it up: I brewed coffee at home, I walked it over in a thermos. And goddamit if last week wasn’t one of our more intense sessions.
So, a new routine in the morning, because I still find routine nurturing, but a fresh one that is more languorous. I wake up. It’s dark. I grind the beans, heat the water. I’ve dialed the ratios and timing by this point so I can eyeball things: pop in the filter, do the pour-over. And while the coffee steeps, I lie on the rug, take my time, stretch a bit or do some push-ups, and try to recall whatever’s sticking around from my dreams. Finally, I stand up and do the swirl—and wow, yes, it’s good.
Though maybe next month I’ll drop coffee entirely and switch to Celsius, Fuji apple pear flavor. We’ll see. That stuff is crack.
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“Meditations in an Emergency” is a weekly essay from author Rosecrans Baldwin about something beautiful. Paying subscribers receive a Sunday supplement with three-plus things to love, plus a monthly travel-lust ballyhoo.
Rosecrans is a correspondent for GQ, a contributor at Travel + Leisure, and the bestselling author of Everything Now: Lessons From the City-State of Los Angeles, winner of the California Book Award. Other books include The Last Kid Left and Paris, I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down. His debut novel, You Lost Me There, was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice.
For books, articles, bio, contact info: rosecransbaldwin.com.
Always the smell gets me moving out of the bed. Thinking back, "the smell"
began when I was in Florence for the summer. Every morning I woke up to a tray
carrying hot milk and espresso in separate pitchers to be poured together in
a cup-- I mean, seriously!!